Why You Should Right Align Form Labels?
Swapnonil Mukherjee offers a good explanation as to Why you should right align form labels. He suggests by showing good examples that you eye must travel a smaller distance to navigate from form field to form field when the labels are right aligned.
If only it were that simple. If it’s a form that people use over and over again, then left aligned will probably prove more usable because it’s easier to scan the fields labels. Right aligned field labels produce a jagged left edge that’s impossible to scan (for us left to right readers). The user has to read each item individually.
On the other hand, if it’s an unfamiliar form, or if users are likely to move field-by-field regardless of whether or not they’re familiar with the form, then right aligned is probably preferable.
If the form is short, it probably doesn’t make a difference either way since we can match list position pretty easy between the left and right columns provided there aren’t too many rows. For a short form, I’d go with left aligned form field labels in order to improve “scannability”.
So, a screen which shows application preference should probably be left aligned. That would allow users to scan the list for a specific setting. A lengthy shopping cart checkout form, on the other hand, should probably be right aligned. Users will probably be unfamiliar with the form, and they will have to provide information for each field sequentially.
That said, I almost always use left align fields. I break up long forms into sections so that the user’s eye can more easily digest the form fields. I try to group fields in familiar patterns (name, address, city state zip) and size fields accordingly.
The calculated eye movement speed is not very relevant for the usability. The user not only has to see the words, he has to understand the complete form.
With left-to-right languages people are used to left alignment. They have learned where to expect the beginning of a line. And they expect things on the (top)left to be more important than things on the (bottom)right.
When you look at the whole form in Swapnonil Mukherjee’s example, the long labels draw more attention than the short ones. In many cases the word length is inversely proportional to the importance of the word.
If you want to support reading speed you can improve the visual design, for example more white space between the lines or a visual connection between the label and the text-box. Avoiding long labels is perhaps the best strategy…